Comments on: Presto Chango

By: Berthold

Berthold — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:17:57 +0000

Like the site design and colour choices, but why diss grids?

They are a great way to establish a horizontal rythm without overusing borders, making the design lighter on the eyes and generally less chaotic. Right now, I have 2 grey bars on the right side of this comment field w/o content that distract me for no particular reason (because of their contrast) and that don’t line up properly with the lines in your footer. I realise that studying graphic design makes me more likely to be irked by stuff like this, but I still say grids are grrreat.

Plus it may seem extra trouble to design on a grid, what with all those templates out there. But in all honesty, I design the grid right into my first sketch and just size the divs accordingly. It’s easy breezy lemon squeezie.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:10:50 +0000

Holy crap.

Both completely startled and at the same time, quite impressed. Like the new design!

By: gb

gb — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:24:39 +0000

Took me a lil while to see it (I was prepping for my brain surgery on the 4th), but I have to say I like the site updates, Mike. I wish my recovery state allowed me enough of my normal wit, but let’s just settle with this: nice.

One of these decades I’ll have time to get my personal site refreshed…

By: James Dimick

James Dimick — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:30:00 +0000

… The only thing that’s making it hard is that my *default* feed doesn’t include everything.

Hmm. That’s odd!

Well, I also just found this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_Feeds
That might also be a good reference.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:03:23 +0000

Jonathan: Will check out FairShare. Thanks!

James: Yeah, I will probably just have to do the mod_rewrite thing to take care of this. The only thing that’s making it hard is that my *default* feed doesn’t include everything.

Pallian: Yeah, I need to start stripping styles from my feeds unfortunately.

By: Pallian

Pallian — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:41:17 +0000

Hey Mike – you may know this already, but your RSS feeds breaks for this post… not a biggie, but thought i would mention it if no one else did so far.

By: James Dimick

James Dimick — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:29:45 +0000

Hey Mike,
I love the redesign! Very beautiful! I also love how some parts of the new design maintain some of the feelings from the last version. Great work. ;)

For your feed issues, have you seen this:
http://dailycupoftech.com/2007/07/25/creating-custom-wordpress-feeds/
Going that route you wouldn’t have to filter things in custom code. Just include the filter options in the URL. Then if you still wanted it to work like “mikeindustries.com/feed1/” “mikeindustries.com/feed2/”, etc. you could simply use some custom rewrite rules. That way you’re not reinventing the wheel with custom filtering code like you’re doing now and instead using what WordPress already has.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:32:36 +0000

Congrats on the switch to full feeds. Have you considered using FairShare (fairshare.cc) to track where your feed content is? Might help you detect and stop any abuse that does happen.

Let me know if I can help in some way.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:36:50 +0000

I’d say chalk it up to a Gremlin. I disabled all extensions, it still shows up as such. I know my setup allows millions of colors as Safari is ok, unless there’s some setting in FF that allows it to revert that I just don’t know.

I run an interactive media division at a “old” media company; I know one-offs happen. It was just weird as I’d never seen this.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:21:56 +0000

Jason: Thanks for the screenshots. And Nick, thanks for verifying with the color meter. The only thing I can think of is that maybe your color depth is set to “thousands of colors” or something? The Flash headlines are given the exact same hex values for the backgrounds as the html backgrounds are, so somehow, your system is rendering Flash colors differently than html colors. Can’t imagine why, but it’s clearly happening.

By: Tom Watson

Tom Watson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:50:59 +0000

I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while now, but I kept getting interrupted and it’s been in my “to-read” list for about a week now. Anyway, I’m late to the party, but it looks great, and I like the attention to the little things. Thinking about the RSS feeds, how you really want to share your content, and what’s best for the Mike Industries readership. Anyway, it looks and works great and I can’t wait for “The House” live cam. Jerk.

By: Nick Chaves

Nick Chaves — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:04:36 +0000

Jason, I also have Firefox 3.06 and Safari on a Mac and the colors are the same for me, verified with DigitalColor Meter (the blue header is #6A798D in both). (And I’m on FF3 in Windows now and have verified that is the same color here too).

Perhaps you have an extension in Firefox which renders colors with Windows standard gamma instead of Mac?

This is the only thing I can think of that would make the difference.

By: Christopher Schmitt

Christopher Schmitt — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:54:11 +0000

Great job with the redesign–not only the look, but the production quality, too! Congrats!

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:24:12 +0000

Mike,

Hope this helps… Versions:

FF 3.0.6, Safari 3.2.1 — both on Mac OS X 10.5.6.

Screenshots of header:

http://980media.com/static/img/ff3_mike.png
http://980media.com/static/img/safari_mike.png

The footer graphics are the same.

If you figure it out, would love to know… I had to drop it for a while.

-Jason

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:43:53 +0000

Dan and Brade: Yeah, since I moved out of my last condo, the view hasn’t been as good so I shut it off for now. Once I move into the House though, there will be a live cam that puts all others to shame.

Greg and Brade: Yeah, that’s a good point about Twitter. I think I’ll keep them permalinked via the Comments link, but will also link back to the original Tweet.

Nick: I definitely thought about collapsing the sidebars in article mode, but I think one major benefit of having them there is for the random person who comes to the site for the first site via a search engine or a link somewhere. Having the sidebars there gives them more to do, more to evaluate the site on, and more motivation to think about subscribing. Also, I think you’re right about the svn release thing. Still. :)

Ben: Yep, you’re right about uncomfortableness v. discomfort.

John: The “deke” is a little javascript-based method I’ve been using for years to eliminate comment spam. Basically, nobody can hit my WordPress comment script directly, therefore, 99.9% of spam is turned away at the front door… without even having to use Akismet.